


Guests at the Table

by thegildedmagpie



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: BDSM, Beltane, Bondage, Caning, Extremely Unenthusiastic Consent, Flashbacks, Gondolin, Humiliation, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Inept BDSM, M/M, Male Homosociality, Mild Blood, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Ritual Public Sex, Rival Sex, Rope Bondage, Scars, Semi-Public Sex, Slavery, Uninformed Consent, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Whipping, accidental injury, but is it sex? an exercise left to the reader, kinky elves, learning experiences, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-24
Updated: 2015-10-24
Packaged: 2018-04-27 23:02:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5068222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegildedmagpie/pseuds/thegildedmagpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Springtime in Gondolin, circa 498.  Tuor discovers one of the customs the Noldor brought with them from Valinor.  Maeglin wishes he wouldn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guests at the Table

**Author's Note:**

> This story contains ritualized elf BDSM. Great, right? I got the idea from a fic series I read donkey's years ago as a wee thing who was just discovering the allure of pretty boy elves kissing each other. That fic is now archived at ansereg.com. Turgon's explanation of the Rites of Tulkas draws very heavily on that author's work, and I am indebted accordingly. 
> 
> It will quickly become obvious that I imagine the worship of the Valar as rather more pagan than Professor Tolkien, in his mature writings, generally did. There are some hints in the Histories of Middle Earth that he may once have written the Valar less as angels and more as gods. (The incest taboo in Idril and Maeglin's story is also a later addition, incidentally; in the early version, Turgon would have been very okay with them getting married. My headcanon combines the two perspectives in ways I will happily explain at great length.)
> 
> Consequently, what we're seeing here is, functionally, the beginning of Gondolin's Beltane celebrations one year, right about F.A. 498. I observe Beltane, and I was at first mildly uncomfortable that if you assign each Valar pair a quarter-day or cross-quarter-day, this was where it would logically have to fall -- but then I realized the Rites of Tulkas would naturally be followed by the Rites of Nessa, the dancer, and that balance made it seem very appropriate again.
> 
> I write some Teleri and Avari characters (and some Maia, for that matter) as somewhat darker-skinned than most Noldor. I include Maeglin and Eöl in this category. My intent is to de-white-ify the canon a touch, but it reads as a little fetishistic in Gondolin and in Tuor's narrative focus; I wasn't sure how to tag for that, so I warn here!

\-   
Most of those he sees in the high, fair stone house are lords of the House of the Harp, which makes Tuor a little more comfortable. He's gotten along well with this faction so far. Of course, he knows he wouldn't have been issued an invitation if he wasn't welcome, but he's nervous enough about this event without adding the awkwardness of people he doesn't know very well – or who don't much like him.

This latter is hard to avoid in its entirety, of course; he can see Maeglin standing off in a corner, almost painfully beautiful where his dark hair and garments are silhouetted against a fall of pale drapes, and the red wine in his glass like blood against a picture sketched in greys. Maeglin has been cordial lately, but Tuor spent three long, awful years in captivity before he escaped to the sea; he has a slave's sense for anger in those above him, and he perceives the passion that smolders beneath Maeglin's lordliness.

Actually, it's a little unexpected that Maeglin's even here, Tuor reflects as he smiles gratefully to warm greetings from his host, and from Salgant and Galunir. Turgon made it very clear that participation is not actually required when he took Tuor aside earlier to explain this ritual to him.

“I tell you things that are assumed to be common knowledge, so it is like that none other will tell you,” he said as they walked in one of the beautiful courtyard gardens of the king's house. “Sleep this afternoon, and wash just before, and remember to be respectful of the rooms of your host, for he will open his home more thoroughly than he is accustomed. Do not walk with the women if you choose to accept someone's invitation and go; for we separate by gender in these rituals, and it may be taken amiss if you seem to be following. And remember, you do not have to go, and you do not have to stay throughout the time of the rite. It is … not an experience that everyone wishes to bear,” said the king, a certain hesitance intruding into his usual collected presence. “Nor has everyone here in Beleriand fully understood why such a rite is so important to us.”

“Will you tell me in your words, lord?” Tuor asked.

Turgon seemed to think it through for a moment – but only a moment. “It gives great strength to warriors if they know that they can bear much,” he said. “If some of the things we fear when we go into battle – pain, injury, captivity and failure – are things we met squarely in other circumstances, then we do not fear them so. This is why we try our strength together in sparring, and why we test our own endurance in Tulkas' Rite. You see?”

Tuor nodded thoughtfully at this – it made sense to him – and Turgon's lips gave the slightest wry, affectionate quirk. “There are also many jokes about lovers using the Rites as a way to work out their frustrations. I think the humor may not have come across, since the Sindarin called us deviants for this practice.”

Tuor laughed a little, though he was slightly alarmed by the implications. The Noldor's easy freedom in taking lovers of their own gender was some discomfiting to him; in the household where he'd been fostered, he remembered being obliquely advised to protect himself against such curiosities. The people by whom he'd been held captive had considered it the province of slaves to receive the lust of their masters, regardless of the masters' marital status or how their bodies expressed themselves – but they'd had choice words for people who _preferred_ lust to marriage, and Tuor supposed that was not such a bad standard. Indeed, he'd felt some temptation with Voronwë when they slept side by side on the journey, but he'd resisted it. Who knew what such things might involve between free men? Tuor certainly didn't.

“In any case,” Turgon went on, “it may surprise you to know that it can be some relaxing.”

Tuor was entirely loath to contemplate the idea of the king he'd grown to love in such a situation as that one – so he ended the conversation a little hastily.

Now he wonders why Maeglin – proud, fiery Maeglin – has elected to attend. And in any case, why is he not hosting a ritual himself, for the members of his own house? Tuor contemplates the matter with growing unease. He can imagine what would draw such a smoldering temperament to the Rites, but he doesn't like to think it of Maeglin.

He forgets his worries, though, in the pleasantness of the evening – someone is playing, a complicated duet of harp and flute which has deep little wells of complexity that thrill him. He's not altogether untutored in music (though he has no talent that would impress the Gondolindrim), and he can tell the skill of the players by the way their music makes the fingers of other harpists unconsciously attempt to follow the tunes. A little food is laid out, though someone laughingly bids him take care not to over-indulge in the light, aromatic red wine which is provided, as he may need his wits about him later. He makes conversation with the other men about the first room of the house, all of them relaxed and merry and clad fairly simply, and he decides that Turgon was right: the freedom of talk and the casually intimate atmosphere are pleasant.

In time, though, something intrudes upon his ease.

The elf is clad only in breeches of deep green doeskin, their seams decorated with a simple repeated pattern of delicate punchwork – surely that does not show the skin beneath, but a cloth lining? – and he wears his long brown hair lightly braided with threads of green and amethyst, pushed aside over one shoulder to display a back pale and well-figured, but not unmarred by faint scars of battle. He catches Tuor's attention at first only by his unclad state; there are his cloak and mantle, Tuor sees, draped over the end of a finely-made wood bench nearby. With some startlement, Tuor recognizes Turgon's chief loremaster: Sedhost is his name, or maybe Sedhys. Tuor knows him to be one of the eldest of the Noldor who remain in Middle-Earth – perhaps older than Turgon, who someone said to Tuor is only the second generation removed from the Unbegotten. Tuor knows nothing, however, of the elf standing next to the loremaster – he thinks he recognizes one of the House of the Harp, but he isn't certain. Tuor can see, though, that the second elf, a golden-haired beauty with ink stains on his fingers, looks some nervous.

As well he should. After a whispered question to which the golden-haired elf nods twice, Sedhost or Sedhys gathers elaborate courtly braids into one hand and uses the tresses to draw his partner up, taking him off balance – and keeping him that way as Sedhost, one-handed, begins to undo the fastenings of an unadorned velvet jerkin.

Tuor can't take his eyes off them as Sedhost, wearing a soft little smile that's somehow dagger-dangerous, efficiently strips his partner, who is trying to force his hands to lie still at his sides even as they escape and flutter toward the lacings of the fine shirt under the jerkin, toward Sedhost's hand in his hair, toward hips methodically exposed as his trousers are drawn down.

Embarrassed, Tuor shifts on his feet at this point, glancing around only to find that others are watching with equally rapt attention. Conversation has fallen low, letting the tableau playing out against one wall become the center of the room's attention.

Sedhost has disrobed his victim now. Never relinquishing his grasp on sleek golden locks, he presses the other man to his knees, encouraging him with a quiet word to rest his forearms on the bench – from which Sedhost has also taken a long, thin branch. When Sedhost tests the switch in the air, the noise it makes causes Tuor to jump.

“Steady, there,” says Salgant, appearing at Tuor's elbow to catch a spilled drop of wine from the mortal's glass on his finger. Salgant swiftly licks the finger and gives Tuor a roguish smile. Tuor smiles back, relieved by the company as the first blow falls on the kneeling elf's unprotected back, making him startle again, though not so badly as before.

A pink stripe has bloomed on the elf's back, just below where the last rib must fall, rising into a horizontal welt running from his right side to an inch from his spine. As Tuor watches, Sedhost lays another stripe on the other side to perfectly match the first. The switch is light in his hand, the other fingers firm on their handful of hair, and the kneeling man is breathing with an obviously deliberate slowness. The next blow forces a soft grunt from his throat. Sedhost warms to his work as he adds the symmetrical fourth, then another set; his own hair is falling over his cheek, a slice of warm brown in front of the ear behind which he's tucked the rest, and he seems to have eyes for nothing but his victim, as though the audience isn't even there.

“Is that not a beautiful sight?” Salgant murmurs, and Tuor finds himself nodding agreement. Salgant's expression holds his attention for a moment, too – the wine has moistened the dark-haired harper's sensual mouth, and there's something avid in his pale grey eyes.

“A pleasure to see a skillful craftsman at his work,” Salgant goes on after a moment. (Sedhost has laid down twelve stripes now.) “Sedhost hardly ever draws a blank lot – nor a red one. It seems Tulkas still loves him well, no?” There's a little something sad about his expression, but he shakes it off as the fifteenth stroke blooms across the pale sides, and redirects his attention to Tuor. “What have you drawn, pretty mortal man?”

“What?” Tuor asks, startled away from the scene before him. The golden-haired elf is gasping now, his controlled breathing yielding to a touch more obvious hurt. Sedhost murmurs something in the old Valinorean Quenya, rather than the odd Gondolin dialect – Tuor doesn't catch the words, but the tone is reassuring.

“What have you drawn?” Salgant repeats, all patience and merry sparkle below his raised eyebrow.

“Nothing?” Tuor guesses, suddenly ill at ease – and consequently jumping again when the nineteenth stroke brings a low, pleading noise from the golden victim's throat.

“Oh, dear, you didn't draw?” Salgant chuckles, not unkindly. “Your host has failed his duties. We will go when Sedhost is finished showing us how it's properly done.”

Without looking at them, in the space between the twentieth stroke and the twenty-first, Sedhost gives an elaborate courtly bow, his victim's head coming up with a low, strangled sound as his hand lifts. “A service I am only _too_ glad to offer, friend Salgant.”

Tuor colors a bit – he'd entirely forgotten that the pair so involved in their strange, brutal dance can hear them perfectly well a few feet away. Salgant only laughs his gentle laugh again as Sedhost murmurs, “We're almost there, my brave one. Nearly done.”

Twenty-two strokes. Twenty-four. The twenty-fifth is laid with a sudden increase of force – Tuor automatically drains his glass rather than watch the abrupt rising of the welt, cutting angrily across lighter ones – and the victim keens a little, his hands scrabbling at the bench before closing white-knuckled on its edge to take the twenty-sixth, which mirrors the other perfectly but if anything is applied even harder. His long, pained groan is loud over muted conversation.

But Sedhost casts aside the switch at that point and suddenly draws the golden-haired elf up, half by his hair and half by his upper arm. He turns the other man to face him and kisses his cheek gently. Tuor is close enough to hear what he says in a voice low and sweet as flowing syrup: “I think Tulkas would be _well_ pleased with you, young one. Well pleased indeed.”

The intimacy of the moment both fascinates and discomfits Tuor, but Salgant is already tucking a hand through his arm to draw him away. Thus, he feels Tuor's deep shudder when, from somewhere deeper in the house, over the renewed chatter, someone cries out in a moan that's almost a scream.

“Never fear,” Salgant says, squeezing his elbow in comradeship, “I expect that's just someone getting enthusiastic with a bit of springy willow-wood.” He looks up at Tuor with eyes unexpectedly understanding. “I am not pressing you to draw, am I, when you're not comfortable? You don't _have_ to – I don't think Tulkas is paying enough attention to be offended if you'd rather not face his trial.”

There's that deep sadness below Salgant's cheerful sensuality again, and perhaps this is what makes Tuor say, “I would like to, actually.”

“Excellent!” Salgant claps him on the back and steers him toward a silver bowl, set all alone on a blood-red cloth near the door.

His host is hovering near, and expresses chagrin that he did not invite Tuor to draw before, glancing nervously at the lord of his faction – but Salgant shakes his head merrily, setting the golden ornaments in his deep brown hair to chiming, and says that Tuor wanted to see the rite before he joined it, at which their host laughs and says this was probably wise. He gestures to the bowl of tiles. “These were made for the first rite after we left Valinor,” he says proudly. “Crafted at Lake Mithlim when we first began to find ways to observe our traditions again. They are some of the oldest things I own, now.”

Indeed, the dozen or so tiles still in the bowl are a humble sort of beautiful, made from a pale grey clay which gives a twilit glow to the warm, thin cream-colored glaze upon them. “Don't look!” Salgant advises him jauntily. “Tulkas has plans for you.”

That's what Tuor is afraid of. He looks away across the room as his fingers stir the tiles, feeling his nails catch on sigils etched finely but deeply into the porcelain. Uncertainly, he grasps one and lifts it out.

There's a _tengwa_ scratched into the tile, tinted a deep violet. Is that good? Tuor glances up.

“Now,” Salgant explains, “you've been chosen by lot to exact the trial on another – who has drawn the matching one, Saelon? Anyone yet?”

Their host is looking a little wide-eyed, which reflects Tuor's mood fairly well, but doesn't ease it. “I think – I'm not sure – but I believe it was Maeglin.”

Tuor feels very much like someone has just unexpectedly put an insistent hand on the back of his neck (it's a feeling he wishes devoutly that he couldn't identify with such accuracy).

Salgant's eyebrows have risen precipitously. “You are a fortunate one!” He looks to the corner where Tuor saw Maeglin before. Tuor reluctantly follows his gaze – and yes, Maeglin's still there, exactly as Tuor's look last left him. “I've been hoping to draw a match to his token for years – I daren't even ask him to let me try him that way otherwise.” His smile is a little lascivious.

Suddenly uncomfortable, Tuor avoids Salgant's eyes only to find Maeglin's uncanny black ones suddenly fastened upon them as though welded there. Now surely he can't hear their conversation from all the way across the room – and surely Salgant wouldn't speak of the king's nephew that way in his hearing, even if Tuor has misjudged elven earshot (again). 

Reluctantly he finds himself being drawn by the elbow through the crowd, brought to a halt by Maeglin, whose look grows if anything more skewering. “I think I may have found your mate, lovely prince,” Salgant says cheerfully.

_Oh, fuck,_ Tuor thinks.

“He's drawn a black lot,” Salgant explains to Maeglin's lifted eyebrow (on Maeglin the expression looks statuesque, not boisterous). “Does it match yours?”

Silently and not with overwhelming speed, Maeglin reaches into his sleeve and withdraws a tile of his own. It's incised in blood red. It distinctly bears the same letter.

_Sometimes it's a trial of some pain,_ Turgon explained earlier. _Not tortuous – it would take a great soul to bear that and part friends – but it's not uncommon for people to be put to some lashing. Other times it's a trial of stillness, and one is bound and left to bear the position as best he can. The_ parmatéma _calls for both._

Naturally, naturally, it's a _parmatéma_ character on the tiles in each of their hands.

Tuor finds himself wondering, some anxiously, if Maeglin has the power to refuse him at this point. What will happen if Maeglin laughs cuttingly and walks away? Ignores him entirely? Dresses him down for presuming to join this ritual of the Noldor? Refills his wine glass and throws it in Tuor's face? Images crowd Tuor's mind: humiliation, rejection, loss of the small foothold he's gained among these people, offense to their host, offense to the king, no chance of reconciliation between Maeglin and himself.

The silence stretches painfully, then Maeglin seems abruptly to recover the power of motion. He shakes back the ends of glossy black hair that whisper around his jawline – cut so short, even by Tuor's standards, for safety amidst the forge-fires – and sets his now-empty glass rather abruptly on the table. “Very well,” he says, his voice low and – so Tuor always thinks – bearing always something of the music hinted at beneath the crackling of a fire.

Salgant puts in helpfully, “By the character, it's to be a trial of both restraint and – ”

“I know.” Maeglin's tone holds some venom, which makes Tuor shift uncomfortably – Salgant likes to explain things, but it's harmless enough. Salgant, though, subsides immediately – if not without a faint air of I-am-patient-with-the-child about him.

“Come.” Maeglin gestures toward the inner room even as he turns and sets off rapidly in that direction. Tuor hurries after him, a little grateful for the speed. Maeglin is swift, but Tuor is large even by the standards of men; by those of elves, who have less variation in their heights than men do, he's strikingly long-legged. He catches up quickly, to Maeglin's apparent irritation.

Through another lofty chamber, then back to a smaller one, presumably a private sitting room on normal days. Tuor catches his breath, uncomfortable, for in the doorway which leads – he can just glimpse it – to a bedroom, a wooden frame has been skillfully fitted, and rings of iron set into the frame make its purpose altogether clear, as does the coil of fine rope lying on a low seat alongside it.

It's his own reaction to seeing the device of restraint that makes Tuor hastily murmur, “Turgon told me that we might decline the rite. If you are not willing –”

Maeglin's eyes are afire when he looks at Tuor; despite himself, the taller mortal falls a step back. “Might we?” he throws the remark back, his tone barbed and bitter – but equally quiet, for Tuor's ears alone. “Aye, we might, for is not everyone here of the same ilk, a comrade with a long history together? No one would be offended by that, and certainly neither of us is already considered alien and foreign, an outsider among the others here; certainly refusing a rite that's important to them, that reminds them of Valinor where they think that they were stronger, shall not highlight our differences or make us seem craven or ungrateful, or affect the way they see us at all, shall it?” Maeglin shakes his head disgustedly. “A word of counsel, Tuor: hear the king's words as how he thinks things should be, not as how things are. Turgon's faith in his people is profound.”

Tuor thinks this is as much as Maeglin has ever said to him in direct address. He also isn't sure how that last remark, which should be a compliment, became a sharp complaint.

Maeglin sighs, short and sharp, and turns his back on Tuor, starting to undo the fastenings of his surcoat.

Tuor hesitates, starting to realize the truth of Maeglin's words, and speaks from a half-formed resolve to do this well, for Maeglin's sake if not his own. “Am I supposed to undress you? Only –”

“Don't you _dare_ ,” Maeglin hisses, turning back as his fingers fumble haste on the lacings of a black silk shirt.

“Should I be …?”

“Why should I care? I shan't be looking at you.”

After a moment's uncomfortable dithering, Tuor decides to leave his shirt on. He saw the hairlessness of Sedhost and the golden-haired elf clearly; his own skin is less smooth, even before the scars on his shoulders.

Maeglin strips his upper garments off, drops them unceremoniously aside, and toes off his boots. They're getting an audience of their own, Tuor notices, exquisitely uncomfortable. Eyes of green and grey and blue spark with interest as they glance through the doorway – and he's glad Maeglin thought to bring them to this smaller room.

When Maeglin shucks off his trousers and steps toward Tuor, boldly lifting his chin, eyes defiant, Tuor nearly chokes. He's seen the musculature of many a blacksmith, but Maeglin is extraordinarily well-formed. Somehow he'd thought that Maeglin would be compact and purposeful under his customary black-fox cloak and the madder coat he wears for special occasions at court; instead, he finds the elf slender and well-made as one of his own swords, broad-shouldered, but with an understated subtlety to his body's obvious power. His skin is darker than Tuor has ever realized, too; the garments of black with the touches of red must make Maeglin look more pale.

Maeglin has been staring at him, awaiting some remark or action, Tuor suddenly realizes just as the lordly elf snorts and turns away.

“Get on with it,” Maeglin says tightly, raising his arms to grasp above the wooden frame, but Tuor can't, because he's just noticed the scars.

From a distance, the little seams in Maeglin's skin must look like the lingering pressure of garments – or a trick of the light. Close up, though, his back and thighs are riddled with fine spidersilk scars – neither as heavy nor as knotted as the lash-marks on Tuor's own back, but there nonetheless. They're well-spaced on his shoulders and lower back, heavier toward his knees, heaviest of all in between.

_I daren't even ask him to let me try him that way … I may have found your mate, lovely prince … not tortuous, but it's not uncommon for people to be put to some lashing._

“Would you,” Maeglin half-growls, “ _please_ get on with it.”

The _please_ jars Tuor a little and he reaches half-blindly for rope. 

Maeglin doesn't move as the cords draw tight around his wrists, not until the final knot is drawn tight and his back arches a little, making him rock on the balls of his feet. He makes no sound. Tuor crouches then to loop the rope around his ankles – and that does draw a faint, startled noise when Maeglin's bare feet are drawn apart to be secured to the loops in the frame. With the elf-prince pinioned, Tuor stands again.

There's a whip coiled under the remaining scraps of rope. Tuor nearly gags.

“Can I,” he says to Maeglin, low and frantic, “use a switch, as the other did just then –”

Brittle, severely polite: “My lord Tuor, I don't want to draw this out.”

“I'm not sure I can manage –”

“For fuck's sake, Tuor.” The hissed oath, the irritation in his usually-controlled tone startle Tuor into a soft laugh, and Maeglin snorts a little too, though it's more derisive.

“All right,” Tuor allows. He sneaks another glance at the leather whip which is lying threateningly there on the chair. It'll help, he thinks, if it's uncoiled. He always saw them wound at a taskmaster's belt; by the time they were unwrapped, they were usually flaying his back while two other thralls, whispering broken apologies, tried to hold him down. He eventually stopped struggling. The others would be punished for losing their grip, and he was stronger than any of them – a truth he'd half-forgotten the first time he was made to grovel after a lashing, to show a mockery of gratitude for his correction by kissing the coils of the whip.

Yes, altogether better it should be unwound. Its braided leather falls along the floor like a thing living, but at least it's not the piled thongs that he associates with unjust and degrading punishment – and the feel of the handle doesn't have the sticky horror of old blood that he remembers under his lips.

Still he hesitates, still he isn't sure he can endure doing this to someone else – but Maeglin's head falls against his shoulder in a long, exaggerated sigh. The prince asks Tuor in an exquisitely bored tone, “Do I really need to instruct you in how to do this?” and, for the first time, his speech is loud enough to draw a soft, friendly laugh from the eight or so people who have gathered to watch this play out. Tuor knows he needs to proceed before he loses his nerve completely, and he raises his hand and brings his arm down with the whip as its extension.

Maeglin _screams._ His limbs twist in their bonds, the ropes abruptly taking his weight as Tuor stares in horror at the stripe he's opened from Maeglin's shoulder to the middle of his back. The reason for his outcry becomes obvious as his brief spasm subsides and his shoulders drop – the weal extends past his neck to his chest. The long whip must have wrapped around his body to deliver a vicious blow at the front.

Tuor feels tears gathering in his eyes as he steels himself again, as he draws back the whip for a second lash.

“Are you mad?” The tone is almost jocular, but Tuor startles badly as a slender figure moves fluidly past him, into the whip's eventual path; he barely stops himself in time. Sedhost it is, now standing behind Maeglin, who is panting in the aftermath of his shocked cry. Sedhost stretches up to touch Maeglin's hands. “His fingers are already going cold. You must _never_ tie someone this way – particularly not a craftsman. And perhaps someone has told you sometime, that whips are dangerous?”

Sedhost is working on the knots around Maeglin's wrists. They're good knots and are taking some time, enough that Tuor can gather himself to say quietly, “I am very aware of the nature of whips.”

Sedhost looks back at him for a moment in elegant surprise – then a bit of chagrin. “I do know that. Forgive me. I should have realized you might need some introduction to the technique. Here – I will show you.” Ignoring Maeglin's bent head inches from his own, he beckons to Tuor, who approaches a little reluctantly. “See, you have used knots that will not give – but they will tighten, and much of his weight is on them. You might badly injure his hands this way. Reach up, and I will show you a better method.”

Sedhost frees one of Maeglin's wrists, but skillfully keeps it caught between his fingers as he re-wraps the rope in a different manner. “You see that this will support him well, and puts pressure on the arm instead of strangling at the joint,” he explains. Pinioning the loops of rope between his fingers and Maeglin's skin, he uses the spare hand to draw Tuor's up to feel what he's doing. Maeglin startles at the touch like a restive horse noticing an insect, but makes no sound. Sedhost does not trouble to react.

Tuor can feel the heat of Maeglin's bare skin, their bodies a breath apart. Is Sedhost ignoring Maeglin so thoroughly as part of the trial, he wonders? Letting him experience the horror of being treated as an object, so that it will not hold terror for him in the future? Or is he just giving Maeglin a chance to collect his dignity again?

“Thus.” Sedhost finishes the knot. “Try the other.”

Tuor is not so deft as Sedhost; he needs both hands to do this work, and help from Sedhost to hold his victim in place, although maybe it is only that Maeglin is mulishly resisting him now. “Good,” says Sedhost, still as though they're practicing on a dumb animal or a lifeless thing, rather than a slightly trembling elven prince. 

Perhaps that's why Tuor instinctively runs his hand over Maeglin's hair. 

The reaction is nearly silent, but it's almost as violent as the response to the first lash. Maeglin jerks in his bonds, snarling, his head ducking forward to escape the touch. Tuor steps back, a little hurt.

“Easy,” Sedhost says mildly. Tuor's not sure to which of them he speaks. “Now, let us have the whip again – but step back and give yourself space. You will hurt him badly by wrapping it around him.”

“So I have noticed,” Tuor mutters.

“This is not a matter of striking as hard as you may,” Sedhost continues as though Tuor had not interrupted. “People often assume it takes much strength – but hitting as hard as you can will exhaust you and injure him. You wish to hurt more than you damage, generally, with such an encounter.”

Tuor shivers a little.

“Take it in your hand and flick your wrist only.”

Tuor swallows nausea. He can see every muscle corded in Maeglin's back, waiting for another brutal slash of the whip – or resisting a flinch from the tickling blood that Tuor can see streaking down from the welt. But this time the whip reacts better, curving more, escaping his control less. It licks along Maeglin's back, but this time the sound he makes is more surprised than pained. 

“Are you all right?” Tuor asks.

“I'm fine.” Maeglin's voice is diamond-sharp, as though Tuor has just dared to question him during a session in Turgon's council. Is this, then, what the Rites are meant to accomplish – the ability to be crisp and dismissive while naked, bound, bleeding? Perhaps they are worthwhile, for Maeglin accomplishes it. “I was a little startled by your inability to manage the thing, but I am perfectly well.”

“Don't be so defensive, my lord,” Salgant rejoins lightly. When did he come in?

“This is a moment between the Lord Tuor and the Lord Maeglin, not a moment for everyone to tease him,” Sedhost says quietly, silencing Salgant. “He did not draw that character.”

“Yet you were happy enough to interfere,” Maeglin points out.

“I have need of the weapons you make, and therefore of the hands you make them with,” says Sedhost. Maeglin huffs a little but subsides. “I will leave you to your Rite.” He bows and withdraws, arranging himself against the wall, and Tuor is again left alone with his task.

Another flick of the wrist. Another stripe along Maeglin's back. But this time he is almost silent.

That makes it easier, Tuor finds, and he falls into the rhythm of the act. A light motion of his hand, a crack of leather and a gasp or soft sound from Maeglin, the whip sliding back along the floor for another stroke. He breaks the skin only a time or two more, small areas going a deeper red, though the natural darkness of Maeglin's back hides much of the ruddy flush of the welts.

Were he using the full strength of his arm, he knows he could carve Maeglin open like a butchered carcass – the same has been done, often enough, to Tuor himself. But there's something that soothes about the delicacy of this gesture, the whip falling under its own weight, the gentleness of his efforts (and their less-gentle results) seeming well-paired with the beauty of the elvish body – a form which always seems to Tuor deceptively fragile, sleekness and similarity hiding the vibrancy that burns within them. The movement is hypnotic, Maeglin's low, rhythmic noises more so. Slowly, it helps him understand what Turgon meant when he said the Rites were sometimes relaxing. Slowly, it awakens him to pleasure.

He's striped Maeglin's entire back, bringing up a streaky flush around the diagonal, bloody mark of that first stroke, by the time he realizes he's thoroughly lost count of the lashes. No inch of skin from neck to waist is unmarred. Only in a couple of places has the skin broken - but every inch looks like if he rubbed his hand firmly over it, the welts would tear. A bit dazed, he looks to the watchers – a dozen, now, and all of them are a bit wide-eyed. They look – impressed? Appalled? Intrigued?

“Is that enough?” he asks uncertainly, softly.

Maeglin is breathing hard, and Tuor feels a twist of guilt in his stomach when the elf rapidly chokes out a response in oddly-accented Sindarin – was that _I understand_ , or perhaps _I am listening?_ Tuor can't catch it – cut off mid-syllable as Maeglin's shoulders tense again. “That's your decision,” he gasps, back in Quenya now. “Do you think me … too cowardly to let you make it?”

“No!” Tuor begins to coil the whip in his hands again. It's a little more comfortable to handle now, he finds. “Let us be finished, then.”

Does Maeglin groan a little? But Tuor moves quickly to unpick the knots around his wrists – forgetting that Maeglin's feet are tied as well. Maeglin sways as spread feet take his weight, and Tuor apologizes hastily as he bends to unbind them. The elf half falls forward, and shoots Tuor a thoroughly annoyed look over his shoulder when he catches himself with a hand on the wooden frame.

It should make Tuor desperately uncomfortable that there are visible tear-streaks outlining Maeglin's cheekbones. But instead it causes an urge he cannot explain. An urge to take Maeglin in his arms and run his hands over the lash-marks, stimulating them with his nails until the individual lines of fire whose feeling Tuor remembers so well have combined into one bearable plane of low burning. To wipe the tears away with his own fingers. To do as Sedhost had done with his own partner earlier, to tenderly sweep the hair out of his face and tell him he's endured an impressive lashing, that he has been brave.

Tuor chooses to believe that these urges are paternal. Tuor can rationalize Maeglin's youthful appearance and the difference in their size – Maeglin is tall, Tuor taller by inches – as having evoked an entirely appropriate desire to give succor and comfort. Less easy to explain is his sudden raw awareness of Maeglin's strange beauty – beauty he has sullied, and which he apparently has not been the first to despoil.

Unbidden, he abruptly wonders about the women's Rites of Tulkas, whether they are the same as these. Maeglin's black eyes and bold features are very much his own, but there's a suggestion of Idril about the lashes and cheekbones – and Tuor wonders if she, in similar Rites, would look much the same as this. His mind recoils from that thought – Idril seems as untouchable as a candle-flame, and he prefers not to disturb this worshipful sense that the perfection of the king's daughter is eternal and unchanging – but then he imagines Maeglin, just so before her. Imagines himself bound in Maeglin's place. Imagines both of them there, and Idril as the one who has drawn a black-lettered tile.

He's moved to the second ankle, letting Maeglin turn a little more comfortably, and at his eye level he can see that Maeglin is not entirely unaroused. Tuor feels himself respond, whether to what he sees with his eyes or with his mind, he cannot say. And when these fevered images coil into another … well does Tuor remember being forced to use his mouth to pleasure his master during his captivity. And well can he imagine leaning forward and licking Maeglin, unforced, unbidden, taking a liberty which no faithful promise legitimizes and no loving bond has invited.

He has been uncomfortable with the curious audience, but suddenly he is very glad they are not alone.

He finally unpicks the last knot. Maeglin staggers forward a little on obviously numb feet. All the better; for Tuor does not have to meet those piercing eyes, which he suddenly feels sure could ferret out his feelings in an instant. Instead he bows a little, saying, “I thank you for partnering me despite my ignorance,” and turns to flee.

“Well!” is the last thing he hears – Salgant is speaking – as he makes a purposeful way back to the table where he shall find more wine. “That was a fine show indeed.”

-

**Author's Note:**

> Eagle-eyed readers may suspect that Sedhost is the speaker from my "Sparing No Pains." Eagle-eyed readers are probably correct.
> 
> Yes, you really can hurt someone very badly with a whip if you don't know what you're doing. Don't be like Tuor. Practice.
> 
> I would greatly appreciate constructive comments, as I've had this scene in my head for years and only recently persuaded myself to actually try writing it down.


End file.
